Lost in a Book

World-building is an essential part of any story, but what about map-making? At Book Riot, two cartographers explain how they create the maps we see inside books. One cartographer’s perspective: “I really wanted to make a map that could easily be an artifact from the world of the book…. I came up with the idea that the map could be a page ripped from an atlas, and someone had written notes on it.” See also: Rob Goodman’sessay for the reader on world-building and its relationship to reality.

“The only way to get something new out of language, to try and get to what feels like the nearest simulacrum of truth, is to bend and shape that language, to break it’s form and strain against it, to coax it into a shape, to play with it. To revel in the disorderly.” Madeleine Wattswrites about Eimear McBride‘s A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing (which our own Hannah Gersenrecently reviewed), the limits of language and the necessity of a “Girl Canon” for The Believer‘s blog.

Are you an undergraduate who writes? Do you know one who does? This year, my alma mater’s literary magazine is accepting submissions from undergraduates even if they don’t attend the University of Miami. Check out its blog for details.

It’s hard to describe exactly who Delmore Schwartz was, for the simple reason that he did so many notable things. The man wrote poetry, edited The Partisan Review and The New Republic, and wrote a canonical short story at the age of twenty-five. In The Nation, Vivian Gornickmakes the case for a new accomplishment, arguing that “Delmore Schwartz is to Jewish-American writing what Richard Wright is to African-American writing.” You could also readGabriel Brownstein on life as a Jewish writer.